Philosophy and art have this homology: they do not exist "for" anything. The creation of philosophy (insofar as in philosophy we inhabit a new image of thought) and art are creations of new existences, new futures. There is no teleology of philosophy: the image is what Arendt called a "miracle" or what others are calling "events". What art makes possible, what it inspires, and what it causes are all irrelevant to the artist or the philosopher: this is the "intentional fallacy".
Really to renounce teleology, however, requires a rigorous conception of "creation" (Bergson, Deleuze, Badiou).
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Query: Does this difference between the scalarity of art and of philosophy complicate the homology, viz., that philosophy's scalarity is a product (inadvertent) of its vectorial aiming (intentionality), while that of art is direct? In the picture I have in mind, there is, necessarily, a philosophical intentionality, though its value is only fulfilled in the failure and unexpected collapse of this intentionality, in which a new concept and not the synthesis which one was aiming at, is created. Now have I contributed to your schema, or just insinuated my own in its place? Bite back...?
Two possible answers: either, as I've suggested before, I just need to surrender the name of philosophy or I would question that art's intentionality is direct. I think that particular way of describing art is a residue of romanticism.
I would do well with an example.
Btw, reading Glen Gould puts me in a better state of mind to understand your work.
Your explanation of that tonight was particularly illuminating insofar as I had (or so I thought) thought I had moved beyond whatever stuff I had done on performativity when in retrospect I suppose it never really went away. I suppose, however, I still have the same problem that made me abandon it in the first place: viz. how to think performance without falling into something like "process philosophy" or pragmatism.
I also just realized that I think I want to say that, in your scheme, what you say of philosophy is also true of art, though the way or path of this failure is different. This is basically what I meant by what used to be called the "intentional fallacy". I want to extend Beardsley's intuition in a sort of Deleuzian direction similar to the way CD did recently in speaking of what's happening in Proust and Signs (viz. art operates as a signifier for a pure essence under an aspect of eternity).
you've read this? http://www.lacan.com/symptom6_articles/badiou.html
conversations with you are helping me to come to the conclusion that the Deleuze-Badiou controversy is perhaps pretty significantly overinflated. am starting to think that GD simply starts from the phenomeno/logical side, and AB from the ontological side.
I do know how to spell Glenn Gould, btw.
No, so thanks for the text. There is something I find askew in Badiou's (in)aesthetics, but I can't put my finger on what it is. That text looks like it will be helpful.
I agree that the conflict is overstated, but as you know, this may be because I'm just making Deleuze say what I think he "should" say, particularly because I read Badiou after reading Deleuze. So it's possible that my Deleuze is a 'tainted' Deleuze. But Deleuze himself wasn't afraid of a little violence, so I feel justified in that. And, in fact, you're at least partially responsible for making me more of a Badiouian. Not to guilt-trip you or anything. ;)
curious whether your disagreement goes so deep as to take issue with the following (from interview w/ Lauren Sedofsky, her translation):
LS: How does the eternal-truth model of art cohere with the other model that you propose: the tension between the sensible and the clarity of form or, as you state it more generally, the tension between formlessness and form?
AB: In both cases, it is a matter of introducing into form something that wasn’t there. Artistic eventality in the order of drawing or painting invariably occurs at the edge between formlessness and form; something that wasn’t there will be presented as internal to the painting, that is, as pictorial form. A century earlier, Picasso’s re-marking of a horse’s head wouldn’t even have been recognizable as a horse.
Response soon in the form of a new entry.
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